BootsnAll Travel Community

Hello everyone. My name is roberrific and I firmly believe that if you are smart and INFORMATION RICH, you can follow your passion for antiques and collectibles anywhere in the world. Fly anywhere and 'acquire' historic pieces in undervalued local markets to sell on high traffic international markets online, and all quite legally.

Although I personally believe there is the potential for millionaires to be created here, its also possible to have an adventure filled vacation that pays... right?

Has anyone here ever bought or otherwise traded for (or somehow came upon...) some object while on vacation that actually paid for the trip, and then some... what was it and where?

Here is my submission. Just last weekend I was digging up some fine early Canadian glass in what was once a swampy shoreline dump just outside of a small town in old Upper Canada.

Crappy old bottles from a 19th century Canadian mining village are not antiquities.

Get into the real stuff, artifacts and antiques and art objects, and try to move that stuff around the world without proper paperwork and provenance (which is often expensive and difficult to acquire), is gonna land your butt in jail on 7 continents.

Keep digging. Maybe you'll hit oil or get to China.

Actually the two milk bottles in the picture are both local, strangely older than the dump, and unique - that makes them VERY RARE and they'll fetch over $100 each on Ebay. I have already cleaned them and now they are MINT, again. I can't show you the photograph of their embossing or it would give away the dump site - it says the name of the town in the glass on the milk bottles.

But you are right Sophie the rest of the bottles are JUNK. The only other exception being the sealer jar in the very bottom corner which is The Rose in aqua.

And yes I agree to travel and dig is a ridiculous concept. I was looking more for stories like '...I bought this necklace in Turkey and it has keys to the Sultan's harem in Medina or something... and Antiques Roadshow meets travel discussion thread.

Anyone?

The real problems start when you attempt to move legitimate antiques over borders.

If you can sell some old bottle to another Canadian for $100...well, more power to ya. I don't expect there's much of an international market for them.

In the sense of real antiques the law has a word which they generally apply to this type of activity: smuggling.

Import/export of art and artifacts is carefully controlled everywhere. Customs knows the difference between a $10 necklace you bought on the street and an antique. And they're gonna bust anybody who removes such material without proper permission and the attendant duties.

Don't mind Sophie. She just hates the sight of bottles. All those years spent passing drunken Russians on her way home from work has taken its toll.

Welcome!

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Originally posted by Sophie9:Customs knows the difference between a $10 necklace you bought on the street and an antique.

Which Customs office would that be? I doubt the folks at JFK can tell the difference between an Etruscan vase and an artificial heart. How do you think I got Napoleon's severed thigh bone into the country?

"It's an...umm... bat mallet handle. For cricket."

"What?"

"For cricket."

"Okay. Whatever. Move along."

And that, my friends, is how great salad tongs are imported.

i agree with contential op.
antiques aren't exactly difficult to move around. i mean, i suppose it would be if we were talking about queen victoria's favorite ruby necklace that is worth several million dollars and is easily associated as hers.

but i've bought antiques and quite easily resold them without being questioned. if you're looking for hints, rob, try finding cheap items with family names (like "meyer's ice cream-the best in the west!" posters or something.) things like that can be easy to sell to some meyer whose looking.

or picking up some old yearbooks at an antique store. they normally sell for just a few dollars, and on ebay they can go for a bit more, especially the older you get...people get nostalgic, or schools are trying to complete their archives.

good luck.

I think you would be much better off "importing" consumer electronics from the US into any of several other countries if profit is the motivator.

Very cool stuff.

My father is big time into antiques and has found that Chinese wooden furniture from the mid 19th to the early 20th century sells amazingly well in New England (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire). It's amazing how well he can do purchasing items for resale, and he has a blast doing it as well.

Just wanted to chime in with another story supporting your own.

Classic cars and motorcycles... as well as their parts may be worth pursuing.

Everything you can fit in a container to ship across the seas... Jaguars and old sports cars to England, old American iron to Japan. Italian bikes and cars to the States, how many Fiat 500's can you fit in a 40 foot container?

I've done business with folks that fly back and forth to Germany finding old VW's to bring to the states. Maybe I'll find a European buyer for my VW bus when I'm finished restoring it.

Trading antiques that they have been traded for years is on thing but digging up things is another.
Legality aside, as the son of archaeologists I have to say that this is really unethical. It one thing to do with modern globalism but many of these things belong to the local culture and history and it is not really fair to rape a place of that just so you can travel.
What you are doing look a lot like looting and that ranks just below armed robbery in my book...

Seriously for the sake of the places you are visiting stick to smuggling shishas, drugs and electronics.

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I bought an old book about world war 2 printed during world war 2 for $3 a few months ago In Ecuador and sold it online for $30.

I bought an official UPS jacket from the 80's in Bolivia for $5 and just resold it a few years later for $50.

I bought five handmade pipes from Bolivia and Colombia for about $5-$10 each and have sold most for $20-$50.

I didn't make a significant profit but its not hard to make some quick and easy money.

Well let me respond first to the son of an archaeologist that tells me that digging relics is unethical... is liberating gold coins from a sunken treasure ship any less unethical?

How about finding error coins in your pocket change?

Read the story on Dumpdiggers.